Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 3.087
August 20, 1993

1) Shnipishok and Zachary Baker (Norman Zide)
2) Grobian (Beatrice Santorini)
3) GrubYAN (Meylekh Viswanath)
4) GrubYAN (Michael Shimshoni)
5) Oyf (Pe'rets Mett)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed Aug 18 22:25:58 1993
From: n-zide@uchicago.edu
Subject: Shnipishok and Zachary Baker

  I take it that Baker's Snipiskis = Sutzkever's (in Harshav's
introduction to his translations) Snipishok,= my and Rick Turkel's
Shnipishok. The interesting question now is why Shnipishok acquired
these associations - because of  how it sounded (i.e.odd,funny
somehow, like 'Oshkosh' in English), other associations of the name
(i.e., like 'Hicksville'), or for some association - historical,
ethnographic - of this 'suburb of Vilna'. Same question for
Bitshutsh/Patshutsh.

Norman  (Neakh)   Zide

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Aug 19 10:58:12 1993
From: Beatrice Santorini <beatrice@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: grobian

this is in response to ellen's question about the stress on the
german "grobian".  it's on the first syllable, as you'd expect in a
good germanic word, and the "i", though completely stressless, is
not reduced to a glide.

beatrice

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Aug 19 11:42:57 1993
From: Meylekh Viswanath (viswanath@draco.rutgers.edu)
Subject: GrubYAN

Ellen objected to -yan in grubyan being a suffix, because it takes
the stress in the word.  Is this a general principle in languages,
or in Indo-European languages?

Somebody else pointed out that pejorative suffixes in yiddish take
the stress.  It occurs to me that in Spanish, e.g. the suffix -on,
which is frequently used for pejorative effect (ladron=robber,
chingon) takes the stress, contrary to other words ending in -n.  Is
_this_ a general principle (in Indo-European languages, or some
subset thereof?)

Meylekh.

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Aug 20 05:27:27 1993
From: Michael Shimshoni <MASH@WEIZMANN.WEIZMANN.AC.IL>
Subject: GrubYAN

On: Wed Aug 18 11:03:58 1993
Ellen F. Prince asks towards the end:

>good point about pejorative suffixes like -atsh and -ak taking
>stress in yiddish. however, i believe they're all from slavic, no?
>what i was balking at was the idea that grubYAN is ultimately
>germanic. do you know of any other germanic word in which the suffix
>is stressed? if not, then either this ain't ultimately germanic or
>else -yan ain't a suffix. that's all i meant. btw, i don't think
>anyone here has yet mentioned how the *german* version of grubyan is
>stressed. anyone know? a dank.

I telephoned my mother and she confirmed what I had thought.  In
German it is GROBian, i.e. stress on the first syllable.

Michael Shimshoni

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 93 18:10:32 BST
From: P.Mett@open.ac.uk (Percy Mett)
Subject: oyf etc.

[1] "Nissen" Goldberg shraybt [Mendele Vol 3.080]:

e. Our chorus has been pronouncing the "oyfn" in "oyfn pripitshik"
   as written, instead of as "afn".  I tried to get them to change,
------------

This is a of course a 'problem' in written yiddish to anyone who
doesn't speak the language. By the way, until YIVO 'standardized'
did anyone ever pronounce the word as =oyf= . All the litvaks I know
say =af= and everyone else says =of=

[2] According to several contributors, YIVO transcription can handle
all dialects . Beats me. The 'ou' sound in Southern pronunciation is
un-writabe in this transcription, as far as I can see. Worse still,
there is no provision for long vowels.

[3] Khaim bochner [Mendele Vol 3.086]:

>Reforming this was a big battle, and it still hasn't been won
>completely: daytshmerish silent heys still appear in words like
>"yohr" in modern khsidishe kinder-bikher.

Maybe: but it's a lot easier for a novice to recognise a long vowel
with a 'hey' as a marker. So, daytshmerish or not, it's practical.

>So it wasn't necessarily litvish chauvinism that resulted in the
>spelling "gut". That spelling had been accepted for a _long_ time:
>in the daytshmerish spelling of the 1800's, because that's the
>German spelling, and before that, probably because of the Western
>Yiddish origins of Yiddish literature?

I didn't think @gut@ was ever -spelt- other than giml-vov-tes. But
of course mlupm is mostly pronounced -i- in Southern yiddish, so
where is the problem?

pe'rets mett

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End of Mendele Vol. 3.087